A Periodic Table of New York City Trash

Certain items of garbage appear in every corner and borough of the city, like old, smelly, unlikable friends.CreditILLUSTRATION BY PETER ARKLE

My fascination with urban litter began at some point in the past seven years, but I can’t be more specific. That’s the period in which I have lived in Chinatown, and in which I started noticing the neighborhood’s unique and heterogeneous trash footprint. My block, for one, is a garbage buffet. On a typical weekday morning, I might pass a fish head, a pair of adult underwear, a pair of kid underwear, a tertiary cut of meat, a broken settee, a soybean-oil tin, and drug baggies of all colors and shapes, some so small that I can’t imagine more than a grain or two of an illegal substance fitting inside. This all appears within the space of twenty or forty feet. Rats love my block. They frolic openly.

Amid the novel refuse, there are bits of familiarity—Dunkin’ Donuts cups and freshness seals and those little silica-gel desiccant packets printed with frantic warnings not to eat them. These items appear in every corner and borough of the city. They’re like old, smelly, unlikable friends. Because I am a compulsive list-maker, I have kept a catalogue of the recurrent items. It numbers in the hundreds. It is a ghastly document to glance over—an indictment of this city’s occupants, a record of our habits, a litany of our vices, a portrait of our tastes.

Litter generally takes one of two forms; it is either scattered or piled. At some point in my listing, I wondered what it would look like to organize the trash visually into a form that, say, Marie Kondo would approve of. What would a garbage census look like? Doesn’t anything look agreeable if you organize it neatly enough?

My partner, Teddy Blanks, runs a design studio in Brooklyn, and I asked him. He thought the answer might plausibly be yes. We compiled a master list of frequently occurring trash, then went out to find and photograph samples of each piece in the wild. The rule was that all trash had to be photographed in situ, with no human intervention or staging. No nudging with a toe, no poking with a stick. For three months, we walked with our necks at a forty-degree angle, eying the pavement and swivelling horizontally from stoop to gutter so as not to overlook a precious dirty Band-Aid or sullied toothpick. Every outing became a treasure hunt. This city is opulent with trash.

The chart that we came up with is not about the environmental impact of waste. Nor is it a comment on New York’s Department of Sanitation and how effectively its 7,197 uniformed sanitation workers and supervisors remove street litter on designated days of the week. It is simply about clocking items that recognizably recur in the city at this moment in time. It is about organizing these items loosely. And it is about putting them together to yield a snapshot of New York by way of its filthiest common denominators.But, even if this is not a purely scientific endeavor, it borrows a scientific form. Our table has the same cell count and over-all shape as the periodic table of the elements. Just as the original elements are organized by their atomic number and chemical properties (alkali metal, noble gas), the items of trash are organized by function (hygiene, beverage), and, just as the elements are referred to by symbols, each item of trash is given a one- or two-letter abbreviation.

Hover over the periodic table to magnify. Design by Teddy Blanks and Molly Young.

Design by Teddy Blanks and Molly Young

The challenge of designing the table was to take something inherently hideous and combine it with something visually pleasing, if dry. We chose bright, friendly colors to represent each category. We chose typography that vaguely suggested scientific rigor and directly evoked fashionable modernism. We sanitized the trash.

But we are, of course, missing vital pieces. There are a hundred and eighteen elements in the current periodic table, and we stuck to that number for authenticity’s sake, which meant shaving off dozens of items (a fake fingernail, a crushed pylon, a wisp of wig, a forty of malt liquor, a trampled cockroach). In five years, the chart will be pathetically outdated. That’s part of the fun. We will need to start the scouting mission all over again in order to form an accurate garbagescape of the city in 2021. I shudder to think of what we will find.